The 3.12 Kernel is Out

Linus has released the 3.12 kernel. “I was vacillating whether to do an rc8 or just cut the final 3.12, but since the biggest reason to *not* do a final release was not so much the state of the code, as simply the fact that I’ll be traveling with very bad internet connection next week, I didn’t really want to delay the release.“

Some of the main features in this release include improvements to the dynamic tick code, support infrastructure for DRM render nodes, TSO sizing and the FQ scheduler in the network layer, support for user namespaces in the XFS filesystem, multithreaded RAID5 in the MD subsystem, offline data deduplication in the Btrfs filesystem, and more.

Linus noted a couple of other things in the announcement. One is that the 3.13 merge window will not be starting for another week. He is also starting to think about an eventual 4.0 release, and has tossed out the idea of having 4.0 be a bugfix-only release, though he has his doubts as to whether it would work. “But I do wonder.. Maybe it would be possible, and I’m just unfairly projecting my own inner squirrel onto other kernel developers. If we have enough heads-up that people *know* that for one release (and companies/managers know that too) the only patches that get accepted are the kind that fix bugs, maybe people really would have sufficient attention span that it could work.“